Without
Time Machine:

Realistic Appraisal of the Research Trip for Historical
Novelists

copyright 1997 by Historical Novelists Center

For the writer of contemporary novels, there is no substitute
for the research trip. Only then does the author him or herself
see, feel, smell, hear the locale with original senses, not through
the editing of others' reportage. The author will meet people
who provide the pieces of authentic characters, and with luck
will be able to stay long enough to pick up the cadence of speech
and the pacing of life. Writing without it is strictly second
choice.

For the historical writer, the research trip's usefulness is
in direct proportion to the distance in time to the chosen period.

Don't think that you can't properly do a historical novel without
a trip to the places you describe. Especially if yours is set
more than a couple of hundred years ago, it is better to spend
$500 on hard-to-get books than $5000 travelling to get much less
relevant information.

An actual trip to the physical location can enhance book work,
but taking a week's vacation cannot take the place of real research.

In researching the near past, a research trip alone can give
you a feeling for climate, but not much else. For example, more
than a half-century has passed since WW2. Take a trip to LA for
your novel, and you will see more things that should NOT be in
your book than should. Shipyards have changed equipment, if not
location. The Vincent Thomas Bridge crosses the harbour, where
in 1944 ferries chugged back and forth, closer to the ocean than
the bridge stands. Smog constantly obscures what were then common
vistas. Freeways web the landscape where once there were only
surface streets laced with streetcar tracks. Buildings then of
note are gone, then-illegal skyscrapers towering in their stead.

You can hunt out bits and pieces of WW2 LA, but only if you
have researched to a fare-thee-well first. A really good picture-book
or three of the period would tell you more. Your money would be
better spent at the book-finder than the travel agent.

Research trips are most useful when you are targeting the 19th
and perhaps 18th centuries, and you build your itinerary around
Living History sites. These are the places like Old Tucson, San
Diego's Old Town, Mystic Seaport, or Colonial Williamsburg, where
an older way of life has been reconstructed with the buildings,
and "re-enactors" in costume work at traditional crafts
or present vignettes.

However, these are only in the 50% to 75% range of accuracy.
Take one of the grandest of these projects, Colonial Williamsburg.
The "hostesses" (docents) that explain the buildings
and guide you through them wear hideously half-baked costumes:
modern bodices with under-bust curves, the lines of their "hen-basket"
dress supports showing through because they don't wear petticoats
between wire and skirt. You get to hear the sound of horse-drawn
carriages in the street, but miss the dust and smell of accumulated
horse-droppings, not to mention outhouses in high summer. You
don't get to see it unlit at night, dodging footpads. But you
do get to see the arrangement of furniture in rooms, the dark-airy
feel of government chambers, smell the wood-shavings accumulating
in a workshop, and innumerable other details you might need: 75%.

The best way to exploit one of these sites is to do it once
with the usual tourist crowd. Then come back to places you consider
relevant, sit down and soak up the scene, then take copious notes
on your responses and observations. Without the notes, you will
surely misplace the flight of a line of crows, the scent of local
weeds, the peculiar sound of wind in the sails of a mill, or other
telling, concrete details. Finally, arrange to discuss items of
interest with the re-enactors. If possible, get hands-on with
them. Looking at a plow and actually trying to guide one behind
a mule are two different levels of experience!

For older periods yet, the ratio of anachronism to re-experience
climbs sharply. You must do as much research in order to guard
yourself against the bad points of a visit as you would have had
to have done without the trip. The main points on which actual
site visitation may aid you are:

1) VISTAS. What can you see from the headland or tower, provided
you can get up on them? Do the immemorial paths run on ridgetops
or in the gullies? Remember that hills or islands may have been
removed or altered naturally or artificially, that some lakes
are very new, rivers had different courses, coastal land can be
extended or destroyed in a century, and, of course, buildings
shift. Good picture books or videos will often substitute nicely,
though this is probably the hardest aspect of the area to reconstruct
at remote.

2) AMBIANCE. How do thatched, half-timbered dwellings look
in the sunset? What are the feel of ancient hills, the smell of
the marshes? Surviving buildings that haven't been "modernized"
(whether with 19th century improvements or wood floors to replace
dirt) will be worth your time. Landscape often isn't. The area
is either wetter or dryer, hotter or colder than it was then,
deforestation has radically changed the hills, or reforestation
is with different plants in different patterns. If the area used
to be ancient oak forest, go find a modern, old oak forest, maybe
on a different continent or much closer to home. It will often
tell you more than travelling to your geographical target, only
to find the forest replaced with farms, vineyards, or condominiums.
However, if research shows that physical change has not been great,
going there can help you get a feel for the locale, especially
if you live in Wisconsin and want to write about Tahiti in the
early days of European contact. You will still be able to pick
up original but authentic impressions. But you can do without
if you hit the photographic sources and read enough by people
who have been there, or correspond with those who have.

Also, at restored or reconstructed sites, you must be wary
and well-researched to know whether what is there was there in
your target period. For example, at Olympia in Greece, the site
reconstruction is the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial Olympia,
with Stadium III. If you are writing about a runner in the Golden
Age of Periclean Athens, the Echo Colonnade is sitting where the
Stadium II finish line was. The dramatic covered entry for the
athletes did not exist, and the Stadium had only three sides.
At Knossos, you get the reconstruction of the final stages of
the New Palace period, which largely obscures the Middle Palace
and Old Palace palaces. Colonial Williamsburg is shown in its
heyday, not the early, crude colony nor the decayed site of the
19th century.

3) MUSEUMS. If you make arrangements in advance, you may be
able to sit for a week and study the collections. That sort of
visit can beautifully cap your months of book work. Chugging through
with the other tourists, museums can actually be misleading. Docents
are talking to the average member of the public, who wants general
cultural enrichment, not a writer tuned in to one era. At a certain
museum in York, England, they will show you a piece of jewelry,
and call it a "Viking torc." They do not tell you how
completely different this is than a Celtic torc, and so you bedizen
your Britannic princess with an item 800 years ahead of fashion,
the equivalent of giving William the Conqueror a frock coat. Elsewhere,
you will get shown "Medieval armor" that does not apply
to your century in the Middle Ages but having just heard about
a rood that does, you get confused easily and understandably.
Otherwise, the docent may not mention - or know - that what she
is pointing to is parade armor, not battle harness. Worse confusions
attach to Egyptian artifacts, as Ancient Egypt is often treated
as a monolithic culture, rather than variations on a theme for
centuries. Some Gods were not worshipped at all periods, for example.

Books and laserdiscs of museum collections are sometimes better
than the original, since unless you are allowed to handle the
goods, visual data is all you would acquire through a visit. As
well, you can stare as long as you like, for as many days as you
like, at the photographs, rather than being hustled out by the
docent after ninety seconds. What you do lack is the immediate
impression of how large items are compared to you. Seeing a horse
mannequin in barding from well off to one side where the photo
was taken is not quite as dramatic as looking up and up at it
from floor level. Standing in the temple of Karnak will give you
a feeling of the scale no picture can.

4) LIBRARIES & BOOKSTORES. If you want to do heavy research
on an area, you will find more regional books in the region than
outside it. You can snag all sorts of pamphlets and booklets on
old houses that no-one has heard of outside of town. You will
be able to read the local paper for your target year. However,
you can locate a lot of books online now, contact the town librarian
by e-mail (or land mail) for recommendations or photocopies, and
get a lot more done that you could have in the mere 48 hours you
would have physically been able to stay. In fact, use your 48
to set up contact with that librarian or town historian for later
in-depth work.

If you were going to take a vacation this expensive anyway,
by all means make it a tax-deductible business expense (for you
-- your companions' expenses don't count unless they, too, are
writing books about the area)(Wouldn't that be a super custom
charter tour to set up?). Just be sure to take the trip after
you've done a lot of research, not right at the start. You won't
know what to concentrate on, what to ignore as anachronisms, and
will lose the wonderful feeling of recognition and discovery when
you see what you've been studying, when the place in your head
suddenly anchors itself over the present scene.

Just don't use the lack of a research trip as an excuse to
deprive us of your novel any longer!